How Bitcoin Smashes Mobile Payments Barriers

Fri, 25 Apr 2014 22:56:05 GMT

Open Letter to Mobile World Congress, Barcelona 2014from Jon Matonis, Executive Director, Bitcoin Foundation February 27, 2014 I have worked in the currency, payments, and cryptography business for over 20 years, at businesses including Visa, Sumitomo Bank, VeriSign, and Hushmail. The technological developments now occurring in peer-to-peer payments and online distributed trust ledgers will shake the current financial system to its core. Ultimately, this will be a good thing for society and, therefore, it should not be feared or resisted. Of course, I am speaking about the bitcoin network and the bitcoin monetary unit which runs over that network. If I had to describe bitcoin in just three words, I would say it is: Money Without Government. Alternatively, I could say bitcoin is Survivable Digital Scarcity. In just five short years, bitcoin has unequivocally demonstrated that we don’t need kings to coin our money and we don’t need central banks issuing debt-based paper notes and deciding what our money should be. Money is anything we collectively determine it to be. Ladies and gentlemen, the fiat emperor has no clothes. The illusion of legal tender has been exposed. Just like the untainted child in the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, some of us are beginning to notice. It’s not the illusion itself that so offends our sensibilities, but more the notion that a competitive illusion is not to be permitted. If a free market illusion voluntarily agreed...